On 06/22/2016 06:51 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 05:29:12PM +0100, Iain Lane wrote:
>> I don't understand this. What about Twitter clients[0], YouTube
>> clients[1], Flickr clients[2], and probably clients for many other
>> non-free web services?[3]
>
> If a piece of free software requires, for its essential function, some
> server-side software that's non-free, and there's no free
> alternatives, then I think that free software belongs in contrib. This
> is similar to a game that is free software requiring graphics or music
> that's non-free and has no free replacements: the game belongs in
> contrib.
>
> I agree this should be applied fairly across all of Debian.
>
> We have, for example, the translate-shell package, which seems to
> provide an interface to the Google Translate service (which is clearly
> non-free). It's in contrib.
>
> We also have get-ipleyer, which downloads some files from the BBC
> iPlayer service. It's in main. I think it should be in contrib.
>
> Possibly I am in a minority here?
>
I am maintainer of mps-youtube which is a CLI to Youtube (doing also
some things very convenient such as downloading audio/video in many
formats). If its usage of youtube would be decided to go into contrib, I
wouldn't mind it at all ("more Free" Debian sounds perfect for me) but I
want to point out (imho) some difference here: while the software I
maintain streams/downloads data the snappy thing actually downloads and
installs system software. I think there should be made a difference
between something that is a tool to get data and something that actually
changes OS itself. With mps-youtube going to contrib, all web browsers
should also go to contrib as they can access Youtube and so on.
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